Aquatic conservation ecology

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Here we are working to determine the habitat requirements and environmental tolerances of threatened and endangered species to assist their adaptive management and protection in marine and freshwater ecosystems.

Adaptive management of threatened and endangered species requires a solid understanding of their specific habitat requirements and tolerance to environmental conditions. In this ongoing project, we are using a diversity of approaches to assess how species of conservation concern respond to changes in habitat availability and abiotic conditions. For example, we have used assessments of swimming performance to identify barriers to upstream migration in the endangered Macquarie perch (Starrs et al. 2011), new methods for surveying rare and threatened species such as the Murray River crayfish (Fulton et al. 2012) and uncovered how a variety of flow microhabitats support a diversity of habitat specialist gobies in tropical streams (Donaldson et al. 2013).